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The Super Bowl was lost when quarterback Tom Brady flung a football halfway across the field — that went uncaught. But the competition for the Super Bowl's best commercial was won by an ad about a crafty grandma who slung a sling-wearing baby across the yard — to snatch a bag of Doritos.

This marks the first time that consumers — not preselected panelists rating the ads during the game — picked the winner in the USA TODAY/Facebook Super Bowl Ad Meter. Online voting, which began after each ad aired in Sunday night's broadcast, ended at 6 p.m. ET Tuesday. Consumers picked from 55 commercials on which advertisers spent up to a record $3.5 million for each 30-second slot.

But for the Super Bowl's 38 national advertisers, this was also the Social Bowl. Never mind that they spent upwards of $230 million on just the TV advertising time. The purpose of most of the spots was to drive consumers to share the spots with friends, buzz about them and the brand and then try to find out more about the product.

Placing a close second in Ad Meter was Anheuser-Busch's beer-fetching dog, Weego. Two carmakers tied for third: Kia, whose ad featured a guy with ultraracy dreams that include supermodel Adriana Lima; and Chrysler, which turned actor Clint Eastwood into almost as big a Super Bowl presence as New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning.

The gutsy carmaker featured Eastwood in a two-minute "Halftime in America" spot that likened the nation's current plight to a football team revising its game plan at halftime. The spot was initially not included in Ad Meter because it aired at halftime, when fewer viewers are typically watching. But it was later added because of strong social-media sentiment.

Despite jeers from some Republican politicians that the ad sounded pro-Obama, Chrysler and Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne said the ad is not a political message. "It has zero political content," Marchionne said in an interview this week with Detroit radio station WJR-AM. "The message is sufficiently universal and neutral that it should be appealing to everybody in this country, and I sincerely hope that it doesn't get utilized as political fodder in a debate."

Dog vs. baby

The results resemble but do not mirror those of Sunday evening's focus group panel — 286 adult volunteers in McLean, Va., and Phoenix, who used special meters to electronically chart their second-by-second reactions to the ads as they aired. That competition was won by the other Doritos spot about a savvy, cat-killing dog that uses Doritos to bribe its owner into silence about its dastardly deed.

That ad ranked sixth in the online voting for the USA TODAY/Facebook Ad Meter winner. It was the ad with the Doritos baby — not the Doritos dog — that won top prize. For winning Ad Meter, Doritos will pay admaker Kevin Willson, a 34-year-old former special education teacher from West Los Angeles, $1 million. The maker of the ad that was the favorite of the panel on Sunday, Jonathan Friedman of Virginia Beach also got a million-dollar bonus from Doritos.

Budweiser

Budweiser took second place with an ad where a rescue pooch delivers a beer when it hears the magic words: 'Here, Weego.'

Willson plans to split the money with friends, cast and crew who were part of the ad. He's come a long way. "In high school I'd get out of doing papers by asking if I could do videos instead," says Willson, who is now a humanitarian-documentary filmmaker. "I was one of those weird kids in high school who figured out that I wanted to make videos for the rest of my life."

That shouldn't be a problem now.

For one thing, his workplace is about to seriously change. He's been toiling in his garage. "It's freezing in there in the winter, and it's dusty, and it's not a great working environment."

He's tried — but failed — to win the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl competition before. Ultimately, he hopes to use some of his winnings to pursue his real passion: directing comedies.

Hollywood, are you listening?

For Doritos, it was a social-media touchdown. Three months before the Super Bowl, Doritos drove hundreds of thousands of consumers to its website to vote on the two commercials it would air in the game. The company also reached out to bloggers.

"It's gone way beyond the water cooler," says Ann Mukherjee, chief marketing officer at Frito-Lay. Now, she says, it's an electronic water cooler with laptops, tablets and mobile phones whirring before, during and after the game. "Creating a relationship in social-media space is critical."

•We shared. Some 36% of Americans planned to share their favorite ads after the game, up from 31% last year, reports Venables Bell & Partners.

•We stayed. During the last three minutes of the game, consumers were sending out 10,000 tweets per second, Twitter reports.

•We clicked. Major brands that posted Super Bowl-related messages on their Facebook pages before the game had 60% greater engagement than posts unrelated to the game, reports Buddy Media, a social enterprise software company.

•We responded. Some 57% of the ads mentioned a website or URL. About 16% included social-media prompts for Facebook or a Twitter hashtag. And 11% included emerging media technology such as QR codes or text messages, Altimeter Group reports.

Social media were particularly key during the game, says Rebecca Lieb, digital media analyst at Altimeter Group. At Super Bowl parties, she says, people were using their devices "to talk to friends not in the room as much as to friends in the room."

Super Bowl marketers successfully used social media by:

•Teasing. Prior to the game, Kia posted a teaser of ad star and supermodel Lima on YouTube. And the stars of the ad, including Lima, Mötley Crüe and Chuck Liddell, posted links to images and videos of the Kia spot on Facebook and Twitter.

VW unleashed the power of The Force, so to speak, by releasing this year's ad, a teaser and a "making of" video over the Internet weeks before the full 60-second spot aired in the second quarter of Sunday's game.

"It's like leaving bread crumbs along the trail," says Tim Mahoney, VW's chief of U.S. marketing. "With a mass audience of over 100 million, you have to find a way to connect."

•Streaming. Coke capitalized on second-screen viewers with a live stream that showed its famous Coke Polar Bears responding in real time to the game's actions.

•Do-gooding. For every "like" that Anheuser-Busch got for its beer-fetching dog ad on its Bud Light Facebook page, it promised to donate $1 (up to $250,000) to an animal rescue fund.

•Blitzing. GM started brainstorming its Super Bowl strategy about 11 months ago, ultimately using social media to barrage consumers with contests, early views of some TV spots, even a game-day app to supplement TV spots before and during the game for the Cadillac ATS and Chevy Silverado, Camaro, Volt and Sonic.

•Tweeting. M&M Mars created a Twitter handle for its Super Bowl ad character, Ms. Brown, and created back-and-forth banter between her and Ms. Green. "In this day and age, it's not about a one-time ad," says Debra Sandler, chief consumer officer at Mars Chocolate North America.

•Going contrarian. For Chrysler, whose two-minute halftime spot featured Eastwood challenging Americans to get back up on their feet, the social-media strategy was: wait.

Only after the spot aired did the company post it on sites such as YouTube. The YouTube page allows viewers to share the ad and track how it is being spread via a map of the United States. The interactive map shows the total number of people who have shared the ad via Facebook and Twitter, and their locations.

"In addition to viewing the spot on our YouTube page, we wanted to create an experience that allowed people to share the message while seeing a live visualization of where the spot was being seen across the United States," says Chrysler spokesman Gualberto Ranieri.

Even then, many of the advertisers who latched on to social media for the Super Bowl forgot something critical, says Mark Ghuneim, CEO of the digital analytics firm Trendrr. "Throwing out a hashtag, as many did, is a great first step, but advertisers need to do a better job of a call to action."

Finishing last in the voting: GoDaddy's ad featuring Danica Patrick looking and talking sexy from a heavenly cloud.

That doesn't bother GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons one bit. "This year, our two Super Bowl ads broke all prior sales records, so if doing that means coming in last on Ad Meter, that's exactly where I want to be."

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